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Friday, 14 December 2012

As you all probably know by now, I have a thing for making Christmas ornaments for my secondhand and slightly lopsided Christmas tree! This year has been no different, though our creative theme was mostly shrinky art ornaments﻿ (see here), which may not appeal to everyone (though I can't see why not, LOL). So I thought I would share a tutorial which I wrote for the Creative Collective blog (which sadly no longer exists) last year﻿; this one will appeal to those who love more "rustic" ornaments.

Materials

- one packet of dried cinnamon sticks

- a handful of small buttons in your favourite Christmas colours (I went with the traditional red and green)

- one yellow or star-shaped button

- one eye pin or 3cm length of beading wire

- 20cm length of cord or thin ribbon to match your buttons

- your handy dandy hot glue gun (or other quick-setting craft glue)

- heavy duty scissors or kitchen shears

Method

1. Lay out your cinnamon sticks and choose the most uniform and similar ones for this project. Leaving one full length stick to use as the trunk of your tree, create stylised "branches" for your tree by cutting the other cinnamon sticks to size with the kitchen shears.

2. Once you have all your pieces cut to size, start gluing the shorter cinnamon sticks across the "trunk" piece so that they look like the branches of a Christmas tree. You should now have a stylised, triangular Christmas tree shape.

3. Place your buttons onto the "tree" to determine where you want the mini "ornaments" to sit, then glue them in place when you are satisfied with your arrangement. If you have a suitable star or angel button, you could use that for the top of the tree, but I have opted to use a bright yellow button instead.

4. Next, twist the beading wire to create a small loop for the hanging cord, making sure to leave at least 1cm of extra wire beneath the loop to attach it to the ornament. Securely glue the wire loop into a crack in the top of the cinnamon stick "trunk" (as you can see, I went a bit crazy with my hot glue). If you are using an eye pin for the hanger, shorten it to approximately 1.5cm long before gluing it to the cinnamon trunk.

5. Thread the cord or ribbon through the wire loop and knot the ends to secure. And there you have it, a beautiful-smelling mini Christmas tree to hang on your real tree or use as a present topper!